


two corks in my eyes and a bully in my head

by adamantiums



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Comfort fic, M/M, No Plot, jon is sad gay and traumatized :/, lots of reflection, post ep 159
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22267603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adamantiums/pseuds/adamantiums
Summary: jon needed to cry. out of every job that might warrant tears, his must be at the tip top of the list, and yet, he still couldn’t cry.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 10
Kudos: 110





	two corks in my eyes and a bully in my head

**Author's Note:**

> (title from juliet by cavetown) written in the notes app at 6 am after a night of no sleep. completely unedited. please enjoy.

jon needed to cry. 

it had been so, so long since his last cry. he couldn’t remember when it had been, exactly, barely even a ballpark guess. it had to have been years ago, though, certainly before he took this position at the institute. he laughs a little when he thinks about this. out of every job that might warrant tears, his must be at the tip top of the list, and yet, he still couldn’t cry. with every statement read, every secret revealed, hell, every goddamn kidnapping escaped, not a single tear was shed from the archivist’s all seeing eyes, and after all this time, it was finally starting to take a toll on him. 

well, it had very quickly taken a toll, it was just that everyone except jon realized this. he had the tendency, no, the disposition to bottle things up, to let the paranoia overtake him and drive the sharpest of edges between he and his coworkers. for years this is how it went. jon would work alone, keep secrets, avoid people, not being able to tell whether he suspected them or wanted to protect them. (this isn’t true at all; there was a period of time, much longer than jon would like to admit, that his coworkers were nothing more to him than suspects, potential murderers that he was quite literally forced to spend all his waking hours with. so, if you put yourself into this mindset... well, it’s not too difficult to understand his behavior, if only slightly.) through it all he let out emotion only through heavy sighs, through long nights working by the orange lights of the archive, through fighting with tim and picking apart martin for, looking back on it, doing nothing more than care about him. 

further down the road, this was yet another stone on the ever-leaning wall of stressors building up around jon. martin. martin, who he’d so quickly written off, who he had believed to be incompetent, clumsy, a near burden to the archiving staff. who, through it all, had always defended him, even when it seemed so clear to everyone else that jon was in the wrong. (when jon actually was in the wrong, however, martin could be counted on to confront him. jon came to appreciate this; martin’s interventions, as embarrassing as they might have been, had helped quite a lot as jon found himself transforming under the eye’s influence.) jon would never, ever understand this about martin. how could he be so forgiving? jon had been (with no small amount of guilt afforded) horrible to him, and yet martin seemed content with writing it all up to stress. and while yes, jon had been under an incomprehensible amount of stress, martin always got the brunt of it. why him, jon would later ask himself. why martin? why not sasha or, much more reasonably, tim? but martin just took it all, and returned an hour later to offer jon a cup of tea.

we’ve strayed from the topic. jon could not cry. this isn’t to say he hadn’t come close, even that he hadn’t tried over all these years, the longest and hardest of his life. he’d often find himself sitting at his desk in the dead of night, tape recorder finally, finally turned off, his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking, filled to the brim with confusion, anger, fear. he felt like he was crying. there was the heat in his face, the shakiness that came afterward, the shortness of breath - but no tears. growing up jon had prided himself on how little he cried, but now, in adulthood, it was nothing more than a burden, growing heavier by the day; the cork on the bottle of new year’s champagne that was stuck in just a little too tight, finally coming loose only to leave a mess, and maybe even a bruise across the room. 

and this is exactly what happened. 

the safe house did not feel safe. it felt… to some extent it felt domestic, he and martin learning to live with one another, taking turns doing the dishes and bickering over who would go into town for groceries - but never, ever did jon feel safe. this was just the past years at the archives speaking, he supposed, just the trauma, the paranoia he’d done so much to shake. he tried convincing himself of this every night, pressing ever closer to martin in an attempt to really believe it; but nothing worked. no matter what he did, how much he tried to distract himself, how often he tried to talk about it (though to no avail), jon could not for the life of him (a very scary thought that did nothing to help his growing panic) convince himself that it was all over. and finally the cork was shook loose, bursting through the air as jon shot upright in bed, pulling himself almost violently from martin’s arms, and letting forth a cascade of sobs that had been building up for almost five years.

this was just as much a shock to jon himself as it was to martin, who, try as he might to calm jon down, soon settled to hugging him close and rubbing his back, realizing that words were, for the first time in jon’s life, meaningless. they sat like that for almost an hour, martin waiting, caring and patient, every few minutes whispering words of comfort. (he didn’t know how much these words helped, but it seemed like the right thing to do, and all martin really knew how to do was trying to do the right thing.) jon cried until he was exhausted, until he could do nothing more than lean into martin and stare at his feet, head void of thoughts, something he was very much not used to. he hadn’t been aware that crying could leave you so empty, so completely vulnerable, and the one thought that bounced back and forth inside his empty skull was that he was going to try very hard to never do this again. 

when jon finally emerged from this thoughtlessness, he found that he had fallen into martin’s chest, his arms tight around his waist and their legs tangled together, and that his tears were stained down the front of martin’s t-shirt. he whispered a hoarse apology, and martin just laughed a little, quiet and sad, and hugged jon tighter. everything came back into focus slowly, as if there was a photographer behind jon’s eyes, choosing deliberately what his audience was to look at. for a while it was the dresser across the room. then, closer now, was a small pile of dirty laundry on the bedroom floor (which jon would certainly chide martin for later), and when jon finally had the energy to lift his head, his eyes focused on martin’s face, and realized that he too had been crying.

when jon began to cry for the second time, it was quieter. softer in every sense of the word, as if his breakdown had taken into account his tendencies and learned quickly. he raised his hand to martin’s face and wiped away the few tears that were left, cupped his cheek afterward and was about to say something when martin gave that soft, sad chuckle again, and let out a quiet, “don’t worry about me.” and jon’s heart broke. 

just a few months ago jon was oblivious to the fact that someone could still make him feel like this. the end of his and georgie’s relationship had been somewhat of an eye opener to him, a hard punch in the stomach that had caused him to accept soon afterward that he just wasn’t built for any sort of love. his mind just didn’t work that way, and he decided that dragging someone else through the muck while he tried to learn wasn’t worth the hurt he’d cause. had already caused. and so, there was nobody between georgie and martin, no one in the years between university and his appointment as archivist, almost a decade gone by of loneliness masked by his strictly analytic personality. and toward the end, jon wasn’t sure if he wanted somebody anymore. he’d spent so long believing he wasn’t worth it that he started to think that he could live forever in this state; he’d grown accustomed to it, suffocating as it may be, and he wasn’t one to break routine. the first time he thought of it like this was during his first week as archivist, sitting at his new desk, feeling somewhat glad for the first time in what had to be months, and he smiled a little. looking back, jon couldn’t remember if it was a sad smile or a happy one, but he did remember that on the very same day, he met martin for the first time.

it’s thinking about this that jon finally lays back down, pulling martin with him, and in just a few seconds the two looked just as they would any other night. they lay facing each other, jon twirling his fingers in martin’s hair and martin’s thumb making slow circles on jon’s side; but there was a difference. a difference so small yet so large at the same time, and one that only jon could notice: he was safe. 

“thank you. for everything.”

martin just smiled at this, a genuine one, as compared to the small, intensely sad smiles given earlier. he smiled, yet he didn’t know how to answer. because of course, of course he would do this for jon, of course he would be there for him, he didn’t feel as if he should be thanked for that. but he and jon had different perspectives, and martin understood with great sadness that jon painted himself as undeserving and unlovable, that he believed he was far past the point of return. martin thought about all this as he stared at jon, his puffy eyes, his not quite steady breathing, and all martin could think of to say was, “of course.” followed by a kiss. 

they lay there for a long time, just looking at each other, each thinking quite possibly the same things about the last years, the institute, each other. martin drifted off first, though before he was fully asleep he ran a thumb across jon’s cheekbone and spoke a soft, “you okay?” and when jon nodded contentedly, martin was fast asleep within seconds. jon followed soon after, but not before he stopped to think once more about how far he had come. even just a year ago he wouldn’t have thought in a million years he’d be here, curled up with martin in scotland at what was quite literally the end of the world. so, so many things had gone wrong, and yet, here he was, martin’s face beneath his hand and their legs tangled again beneath the blankets, and he realized with a start that he was happy. the thought almost sent him into tears again but instead he laughed airily; jon couldn’t cry again that night (morning?) if he wanted to. so in the place of tears he let himself smile a little wider, then kissed the corner of martin’s mouth and watched the hint of a smile cross his face in sleep before drifting off himself, completely and utterly happy, if only for one moment.


End file.
